For this particular release, we tried very hard to leverage the community.
The majority of new features present in 1.7.0 are from community proposals,
or were primarily driven by community contributors. For me, this represents
a milestone: ZF is now at a stage where fewer and fewer core components are
necessary, and the community is able to build off it and add extra value to
the project.

The funny thing is that Textmate is a newcomer, and, of course, vim has had
such a feature for years. The thing to remember with vim, of course, is its
unix roots; typically if you know the unix command for doing something, you
can find what you need in vim. In this case, the key is the vimgrep plugin,
which ships in the standard vim distribution.

I've been getting a lot of interest in my
Pastebin
demo app -- partly by those wanting to play with Dojo+ZF, partly by those
just interested in the application.

I'm constantly trying to improve the application. I've done one webinar and
one UnCon session showcasing it, and will be presenting it at
Dojo Develper Day in Boston
this Monday as well as at
php|works later this fall,
and want to keep the materials up-to-date and freely available. To this end,
I've created a Github repository so you can
track the latest developments, as well as pull custom tarballs:

I'm a bit late on my ZendCon'08
wrapup; the conference left me both exhausted and with a backlog of email
and work that has consumed me since it ended. However, this, too, is good,
as it has given me time to reflect... and to finally get my slides up on
SlideShare.

ZendCon was alternately exhausting, rewarding, educational, fruitful,
infurating, and ultimately wonderful. I've been to every single ZendCon so
far -- I started at Zend a scant month before the inaugural event -- and
have spoken at each. My first time speaking was a fluke;
David Sklar had just started at
Ning and had to back out of his
"Configuring PHP" tutorial session.
Mike Naberezny and I were drafted to
take it over, and we had N+1 attendees, where N was the number of speakers.
Since that inauspicious beginning, I've gradually taken on more sessions and
stuck around to participate in the conference more. I can honestly say that
this was the biggest, busiest, and most community focussed ZendCon I can
remember.

I've been playing around with Git in the
past couple months, and have been really enjoying it. Paired with
subversion, I get the best of all worlds -- distributed source control when
I want it (working on new features or trying out performance tuning), and
non-distributed source control for my public commits.

Github
suggests that when working with remote repositories, you turn on the
autocrlf option, which ensures that changes in line endings do not get
accounted for when pushing to and pulling from the remote repo. However,
when working with git-svn, this actually causes issues. After turning this
option on, I started getting the error "Delta source ended unexpectedly"
from git-svn. After a bunch of aimless tinkering, I finally asked myself the
questions, "When did this start happening?" and, "Have I changed anything
with Git lately?" Once I'd backed out the config change, all started working
again.

In summary: don't use "git config --global core.autocrlf true" when using
git-svn.

Now that Zend_Test
has shipped, developers are of course asking, "How do I setup my test
suite?" Fortunately, after some discussion with my colleagues and a little
experimenting on my one, I can answer that now.

I have a number of updates and followups, and decided to post them in a
single entry.

First off, you may now view
my Dojo Webinar online (requires login and registration at
zend.com). Attendance was phenomenal, and I've had some really good
feedback. If you want to see it live, I'm giving the talk (with revisions!)
at the ZendCon UnConference, at
Dojo Developer Day Boston
later this month, and at
php|works
in November. I hope to be able to show new functionality at each
presentation.

Second, I've completed what I'm calling version 1.0.0 of the pastebin
application I demo'd in the webinar. The PHP code is fully unit tested
(though I haven't yet delved into using DOH! to test the JS), and
incorporates a number of best practices and tips that Pete Higgins from Dojo
was kind enough to provide to me. When using a custom build (and I provide a
profile for building one), it simply flies.

The pastebin application showcases a number of features besides Dojo:
Zend_Test_PHPUnit was used to test the application,
and Zend_Wildfire's FireBug logger and DB profiler are used to
provide profiling and debug information.

Finally, ZendCon is next week! I'll be
around, but already have a packed schedule (1 tutorial, 2 regular sessions,
an UnCon session, a meet-the-developers session... and that's just what I
know about!). I look forward to meeting ZF users and developers, though, so
feel free to grab me and introduce yourself.

This particular item had to do with how I was consuming custom Dojo build
layers within my code. I contacted him afterwards to find out what he
suggested, and did a little playing of my own, and discovered some more Dojo
and javascript beauty in the process.

I'm pleased to announce I've been selected to speak at
php|works in Atlanta this
November.

I'll be presenting my talk on Dojo
and Zend Framework, demonstrating how to quickly and easily create
rich and dynamic UIs using the various integration points with Dojo functionality provided by Zend Framework.

I'm particularly excited about this webinar, as I've been developing a
sample pastebin application to show off a number of features; the webinar
will feature some screencasts showing the new code in action, and promises
to be much more dynamic than my typical "bullet point and code"
presentations.

I'm also going to show some techniques to use when developing with ZF+Dojo,
including how to create custom builds once you're ready to deploy your
application (and why you want to do so).